


Les phallus visibles de nos âmes

by Kainosite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bizarre Genitalia, Corkscrew Penis, Explosive Eversion, First Time, Labyrinthine Cloaca, M/M, Mild D/s, Post-Seine, traumatic insemination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 19:19:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: Animals are nothing other than the forms of our virtues and our vices, wandering before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls.  God shows them to us in order to make us reflect.~ Victor HugoPresumably this also applies to their weird penises.





	1. The Heart of the Labyrinth (Corkscrew Penis/Labyrinthine Cloaca)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Esteliel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esteliel/gifts).



> With profound gratitude to my beta J, whose timely intervention saved us all from surprise duck dick (the worst kind of duck dick). Any errors of biology or good taste are of course my own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Esteliel, I was racking my brains trying to figure out what sort of Valvert smut would be weird and kinky enough to be worthy of you.
> 
> And then I saw your Nonconathon letter.

Jean Valjean should apply for a pardon. On this matter even the idiot boy was in agreement. Certainly the question of how Pontmercy came to be gravely wounded at a barricade – or what Valjean had been doing there at all – would have to be carefully navigated, but that was what lawyers were for, and they had money enough to hire good ones. Valjean had saved two lives, at great risk to his own. Four, if they counted old Fauchelevent and the sailor who fell from the mast of the _Orion_ ; a fifth, if they counted Cosette. Very well, so he was a thief – he had robbed three and saved four. The balance fell in favor of heroism. It was absurd for him to spend the rest of his days in fear and hiding because he refused to make a simple petition.

“But I would have to turn myself in,” said Valjean. “Pardons are granted only to those who submit themselves to the law. I could not apply as a fugitive.”

“I would see that you were well looked after,” Javert said. Valjean said nothing, but his eyes reproached him: _as you did before?_

“If we simply wrote the Ministry of Justice and _explained_ ,” said Pontmercy, who was of a class to believe that officials might take some interest in his explanations.

“And then you could come live with us,” said Cosette. “I can’t bear to think of you living all alone in this horrid little apartment. Oh, Father, wouldn’t it be better to come out into the sunlight?”

But even this entreaty could not sway him.

Javert wanted to argue with him, but he had already discovered that this was impossible. There was nowhere for the argument to catch, no point that Valjean would properly defend. He would retreat and retreat, or smile sadly and shake his head and say nothing, or look at Javert with eyes in which the long pain of his imprisonment was preserved like a wasp in amber, and in the end Javert would find they had circled back to exactly where they started and Valjean had not moved.

He had the nerve to ask Javert to place his trust in a God who had so manifestly failed to arrange the world in any just or sensible way, to demand that Javert continue to serve Him despite everything, and then refused to place his own trust in that God, or in the authorities, or in his family, or in Javert. All the world could be redeemed by mercy – except, it seemed, for Jean Valjean, who saved everyone but would accept the help of no one. For the most degenerate whore and the most vicious cutthroat in the filthiest gutter in Paris there was an inexhaustible font of compassion, but Valjean had received his lifetime’s allotment twenty years ago in Digne and could expect no more. He could do nothing but resign himself to live out his days in a shabby apartment, separated from his child, hiding from the police, subsisting on brown bread and piety.

Javert knew he was not being entirely fair. Valjean had every reason not to trust in authority, and Javert had supplied a good many of those reasons himself. He had been blind for so long to what was right before his eyes – how could Valjean expect some stranger at the Ministry of Justice to have mercy on him when Javert had stood in the midst of all his good works and condemned him without a moment’s hesitation? But the weight of that old wrong made it all the more infuriating that he was forbidden now from doing anything to set it right.

“They have pardoned worse than you!” Javert snapped one day, out of pure frustration.

It was unkind, and not really what he meant. Of course they had pardoned worse; they had seldom decorated better. But all the talk at the Prefecture that day had been of Vidocq’s latest triumph, and Javert was feeling ill-disposed toward fugitive convicts in general and that one in particular. It was intolerable that Vidocq should walk around openly, flaunting what he was, while Valjean cowered in the shadows, and the injustice owed as much to Valjean’s obstinacy as to Vidocq’s brazenness.

It made no difference. Insults were no more effective against Valjean’s resolute despair than pleas or reason. And so Valjean kept in his apartment a box of false passports that Javert pretended not to know about, and the idiot boy told his grandfather Valjean had moved out to the country and took Cosette to visit him in secret, and Valjean drew them all deeper and deeper into his maze of lies because he was afraid to reveal what lay at its heart.  
  


* * *

  
Strange, how Valjean could be so intransigent in some things and yield so readily in others. The sun rose and set on Cosette in his world, but with regard to her betrothal he had refused to perform even the minimal investigations Javert would have expected of a far more indifferent father. It had been left to Javert, still at that time as much a hostage as a willing participant in this family drama, to determine that the idiot boy was merely an idiot and not a revolutionary. Left to his own devices Valjean would have gambled his beloved child’s future happiness on her adolescent whim.

He was no more assertive in the ordering of his days. While Pontmercy lay on the brink of death Cosette spent her time scraping lint for him, a perfectly sensible and laudable occupation, but the moment the boy’s health recovered enough to permit visitors they were all dragged off to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire so that the lovers might coo over one another. Valjean found this, if possible, even more disagreeable than Javert, but he gloomily allowed himself to be made her daily chaperone. He was so obviously miserable that Javert had at last taken pity on him and given him the promise he had hitherto withheld on principle, so that he might be trusted unguarded with his own safety and he could accompany the girl on some days and relieve Valjean of the duty.

That came to nothing, as putting himself through that daily ordeal proved to be one of Valjean’s immovable resolutions, but when in due course Cosette became Mme. Pontmercy and no longer required an escort to whisper nonsense in her lover’s ear Javert found that Valjean was just as malleable to his own desires. By then he was on his parole and might have taken his leave of them all for good, and perhaps that would have been for the best. But Javert had grown accustomed to their society, and Cosette was a very persistent girl who thought it good for her father to have a friend. Besides, he owed Valjean his life twice over, and while he had not quite made up his mind whether that was a debt to be repaid or an injury to be revenged, he could achieve neither by quitting his company.

So he brought Valjean out with him on his informal evening patrols, and railed against the strange crevasses that had opened up beneath his feet in the once smooth and certain plain of his morality, and took him to dinner at the cheap café on the corner of the Rue des Billettes whenever the portress complained he had not been eating. If Valjean endured all this as morosely as he had once endured the daily visits to Pontmercy, still, he came along as meek as a lamb, and at least he was not shut up in his apartment staring at the wall, which was what Javert quite often found him doing when he called. There were even times when Valjean’s melancholy lifted and he seemed to take some small pleasure in Javert’s visits.

Before his plunge into the river, Javert had lived in perfect solitude. He sought neither friendship nor love and never thought to rue their absence; his functions were the only companions he required. And then, in a breath, the whole of human society had burst in upon him: friends, daughters, convalescent insurgents, debts, weddings, conversations, affections, conflicted loyalties. Perhaps it was not altogether surprising that this sudden downpour onto parched soil awoke, along with a need to take long walks through the city and complain to a patient audience about the inconsistent enforcement of the prison regulations, other urges that had long been dormant. In time Javert came to see his new companion as something more than the progenitor of vexing moral dilemmas, and in this too, he found Valjean was willing to be led.

Sex had dawned on Javert with the light of a revelation. Pinning Valjean to the bed, seeing that strong body pliant beneath him and racing through the curves of its tight passages, he felt a satisfaction he had only previously known after a hard-won arrest. He understood now why one said ‘to take a lover’ in the same way that the police took a thief: there was, in this possession, a trace of the same triumph he had once felt in seeing Valjean behind bars. But as with most matters involving Valjean, it quickly evolved into a source of exasperation and worry.

Javert wanted to believe that their lovemaking was a ray of light piercing the clouds of gloom that constantly surrounded Valjean, except when the sun put in a rare appearance in the person of his daughter. He had some evidence for this, for it unquestionably provided a momentary distraction, and Valjean’s coil responded enthusiastically enough to his touch. Javert had a hunter’s instinct for drawing out his prey, and like himself Valjean had spent many years in monastic isolation and was ill-prepared to withstand his attentions. But one could never truly know whether a lover welcomed a screw or merely submitted to it, and Valjean was prepared to quietly endure so much. It seemed to Javert sometimes that there was a slippery evasiveness even in his willing surrender, that it was just another means of escaping an argument.

They had attained an uneasy peace, but it was a peace made in the shadow of the bagne, for the fear that someone other than Javert might recognize Valjean and denounce him to the authorities always hung over them. As long as he remained a fugitive, he would be condemned to a twilight existence, banished from the broad light of day and the bosom of his family.  
  


* * *

  
Javert had hoped Valjean might forget his callous remark on the subject of his pardon, which had sunk without a trace into the bottomless well of his unhappiness. But on the evening of Vidocq’s long-awaited and richly deserved dismissal Valjean came to his apartment with the _Moniteur_ beneath his arm. 

He held out the newspaper, folded to reveal the relevant column at the bottom of the third page.

“They have pardoned worse than me, but never for long,” he said, with nothing but a terrible weary sorrow in his face.

He might have had the decency to take some satisfaction in his vindication. He might have had the decency to bring an opposition newspaper, which would have taken some satisfaction on his behalf, and which Javert could have taken some satisfaction in stuffing in the fireplace and burning. But no, this was Valjean the saint, Valjean the martyr; he had brought the _Moniteur_ , which blandly announced the news without a hint of criticism for the government or its choices then or now, because he knew Javert would not have the _National_ in the house and in such small matters he was unfailingly respectful of his feelings. While utterly disregarding them in all the important ones.

Javert was not a man of many social graces, but even he realized these were not complaints he could voice aloud.

Instead he expressed his feelings by ripping the paper out of Valjean’s hands and throwing it down on the table, and then pinning Valjean to the wall beside his vexingly empty fireplace and claiming his mouth with a furious kiss. Since this solved no problems and offered only a temporary relief from his misery, Valjean allowed it, letting Javert steer him where he would and opening his lips to the assault.

“This proves nothing,” Javert insisted when he finally permitted them to come up for air. Valjean looked breathless and a little dazed, which was an improvement on the despondency that had preceded it.

“But–” Valjean shook his head, trying to clear it. “You must see, Javert. Even if they were to grant me clemency it could be ripped away in a moment.”

Vidocq had not, technically, been pardoned, but such legal niceties were beside the point.

“Vidocq was the author of his own destruction; he was given a second chance and he squandered it. You would not.”

“You think they could not find something against me? You found me at a barricade– ah!” said Valjean, for Javert had nipped him to stop him talking such rubbish. He bestowed a soothing kiss on the red mark he’d left and drew back so he could look Valjean in the eye.

“A barricade where you saved two lives, you ninny. Really, if you are going to compare yourself to that scoundrel Vidocq I can think of much better things we could be doing.”

“You did say you wished to discuss the new law on associations,” Valjean said, deadpan. It was his way of playing coy.

“At the moment I would prefer to form one,” said Javert. He nibbled a line of kisses along Valjean’s throat to his ear, tracing the line of his beard. “If you will not let me secure your freedom then at least let me do this for you,” he murmured into Valjean’s ear, and reached down to cup his groin.

Valjean made a soft noise of assent and leaned back against the wall, lifting his eyes to heaven – or more precisely to the water-stained plaster of Javert’s ceiling – as if he hoped to find there some answer to his plight, or forgiveness for this minor act of fornication. But if he repented of the sin it was only halfheartedly, for even as he offered his silent prayer he was slipping off his waistcoat so Javert could unbutton his suspenders and slide his trousers down to his knees.

Javert reached beneath him and parted the white curls to reveal the rosy rim of his opening, already flushed and swelling in anticipation of what was to come. Pushing a finger inside the puckered circle, he stroked the bulge on the left side where Valjean’s coil lay nestled in its sheath, wrapped around itself in tight loops like a ball of twine.

“Well, Valjean, do you think _this_ will be brave enough to come out of hiding? I think it will. I think it is bolder than you are.”

Valjean made no answer, but his cheeks blushed as pink as his hole and his rim tightened on Javert’s finger. Javert laughed and withdrew.

He made a narrow circle with the fingers of his left hand and held it below Valjean’s opening, and with his right felt beneath the skin for the hidden glands that would fill his lover’s coil. By now he was well-practiced at this, and it did not take him long to find them, taut and swollen as they were with Valjean’s need. Javert bared his teeth in a ferocious grin and pressed up hard.

In an instant Valjean’s coil unfurled, erupting through his fingers in a pink corkscrew as long as his arm, blindly stabbing at the air as it quested for completion. Poor, mindless thing, it could not know that it had been tricked and drawn into the open, and that it would find no tight passage to follow no matter how it writhed. Taking pity on it – and on Valjean, who was thrusting his hips in little shuddering jerks — Javert closed his right hand around it and ran his fingers down its length.

“See how much better it is to reveal yourself?”

He traced the groove of the spiraling channel with his left hand, keeping Valjean’s coil pulled tight with his right, and drew a low moan from him. A fierce desire was rising in his own loins at the sight of Valjean so undone, exposed and at his mercy, but Javert pushed it back – his turn would come soon enough.

“These pleasures are only given to those who come into the light,” he concluded, releasing Valjean for a moment and watching as his coil sprang free. He brought his hand up to the base again, grasped tightly, and stroked down its length, and Valjean’s spend streamed after him, running down the channel and spattering through his fingers and onto the floor. Valjean breathed a sigh of relief and slid bonelessly down the wall.

As Valjean sat there on the floor of his apartment, sweaty and dazed with his clothing still in rumpled disarray, Javert was struck with an overwhelming sense of his vulnerability. He knew only too well the force of Valjean’s incredible strength and the breadth of his cunning deceptions, but Valjean was trapped in a prison of his own making, perhaps the only prison in France from which he could not escape. The urge to protect him rose up almost as powerfully as the urge to screw him, until Javert was almost dizzy with it.

“If only you would trust me in that matter as you do in this,” he said ruefully.

Valjean blinked up at him hazily, and then reached up to pull Javert down beside him to sit with him against the wall. His coil was slowly retracting now that it was spent. As it retreated it traced a damp line across the floorboards, and Javert lifted it up to wipe it clean. Valjean turned to him and began to undo his buttons, more systematic than Javert had been in his earlier haste.

“It is not you that I distrust. Don’t I yield up everything to you in bed?”

“Do you?” asked Javert, for he had wondered about this. Inside Valjean was a labyrinth of false turns and dead ends, and Javert’s coil was no wiser than Valjean’s – it was a blind, stupid thing that dove into the first opening it found, never knowing the difference. Only Valjean could open the true path, and only he could say if Javert had reached his core. Valjean presented so many faces to the world. How could anyone be sure that the one they saw was his true face?

“Try me and see,” Valjean said, with fond exasperation, and liberated him from his trousers.

That would present no difficulties, for by now the pressure in Javert’s loins had grown intense. He maneuvered Valjean into place between his thighs, leaning Valjean back against his chest so that their openings were aligned. Valjean’s movements were constrained by his own trousers, which they had never bothered to pull off completely and which now bound his lower legs together, but in Javert’s current mood it suited him to have a captive. He tucked his chin over Valjean’s shoulder to hold him in place and pulled him closer until his rim brushed against Valjean’s.

At the contact his coil burst forth in a rush, shooting home in Valjean’s passage. It raced through the curves and bends until it could go no further, but Javert rutted up against Valjean’s arse, seeking still a deeper penetration. Valjean groaned and leaned his head back against Javert’s shoulder, his eyes closed and his lips parted in wanton surrender.

“There,” he said. His breath came in ragged little gasps. “Do you feel how deep you are? You are at the center, Javert – how can you doubt it? Oh God–” for Javert had seized his hips and given another thrust, straining his coil to the utmost. He clutched Valjean to himself and came, and Valjean slumped against him, moaning softly as Javert began to retract. 

Almost a meter deep inside him, with Valjean soft and pliable in his arms, it was easy to believe it. It was easy to believe that Valjean was safe, locked in his embrace – well, Javert had always had a penchant for locking him away and making him secure. Perhaps some things never changed. But he knew that soon his coil would retract and the cares of the world would intrude and the clouds of despair would descend on Valjean once again. The labyrinth of fear he had erected around himself was harder to penetrate than the one inside his body. 

If this was the only grace Javert could give him, they would just have to enjoy it for as long as they could.

“You must not doubt it,” Valjean said when Javert had finally pulled out, and turned his head to kiss him. “Perhaps I disregard good advice; I do not know. I can only do as I think best. But never doubt that you have reached the heart of me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some fun facts about duck dicks:
> 
> • Ducks can evert and ejaculate in [a third of a second](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1686/1309).
> 
> • Up to 19 % of the drakes in some mallard populations form homosexual pairs, and forced copulations with other males are not uncommon. [Sometimes they don’t even require their mate to be alive.](https://www.hetnatuurhistorisch.nl/fileadmin/user_upload/documents-nmr/Persberichten/Persberichten/persberichten_2013/DSA8_243-248.pdf)
> 
> • Drakes grow longer penises when they’re surrounded by a lot of other males. So after nineteen years of being chained up every night in a room with two hundred other men, I imagine that in this universe Valjean came out of Toulon _very_ well endowed.  
> 


	2. A Twist of the Knife (Traumatic Insemination)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel strongly that traumatic insemination is the most Les Mis of weird animal penis AUs, and I hope this chapter makes a compelling case.

“Are you sure?”

Javert’s was not a face made to express concern, but etched in the harsh lines between his brows and around his mouth there was a kind of anguish. Sympathy, mixed with another emotion that had no name but with which Valjean was intimately familiar: a knowledge of the darkest impulses of the heart and the harm that might be done if they were to be unleashed, and a terrible fear that one day the thin chain of will that restrained them might snap. Valjean had felt Javert’s lance jump against his hand when he first made the suggestion. There was a part of Javert that wanted this as badly as he did.

Valjean kissed him, trying to convey in a language deeper than words how sure he was. The lines faded but did not disappear completely.

“It will hurt you,” Javert said grimly, frank as ever in the face of life’s unkindnesses. There would be no romantic wooing here, no honeyed words to ease the passage of the blade. “And… you are not a woman, you have no spermalege to welcome me. If the wound were to fester – Valjean, I have seen men die of this.”

In Toulon, he meant, where the convicts sometimes had more to fear from their comrades than they did from the guards. So many men, trapped together for so long with no women and no hope of relief – abuses were inevitable, and in truth the guards did not try very hard to restrain them. What was one more misery in that place of miseries, one more degradation among a hundred degradations, one more crime to add to the tally of their crimes? The weak would die anyway, and the strong were easier to control when they had some outlet for their lust.

“I know. I was there longer than you,” Valjean reminded him, for he was not above wielding his own form of grim honesty. “But they were exhausted in body and spirit, confined in that place of filth and disease, bound by the ankle to the one who hurt them. And sometimes their chainmates would take them over and over again, or offer them to the _salle_ – for some of those poor men death was a mercy when it came.”

The memories threatened to rush in on him then, and he had to close his eyes for a moment and push them back with the sensations of the present: the smell of their morning coffee on the table, the sound of the birds outside in the garden, Javert’s warm hand in his, which would give him no pain he did not ask for. Toulon was twenty years ago and two hundred leagues away; he was in Paris and safe, or as safe as a man like him ever could be. When he had anchored himself he opened his eyes to Javert’s anxious face and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. 

“It will not be like that for us. It is nothing, only a little cut, and we will clean it afterwards. I will be fine.”

“But–”

“You know how strong I am. There is nothing to worry about.”

“If there was nothing to worry about you wouldn’t want to do it,” Javert grumbled, but the tension in his shoulders had eased, and Valjean could see he was on the verge of relenting. The specter of the bagne showed their little chastenments in the bedroom in a milder light, and in its shadow Javert was disinclined to refuse him.

He brought Javert’s hand up to his abdomen, let him feel through the thin linen of his trousers the solid lines of muscle. Javert’s cheeks colored a little as they always did when he was reminded of the strength of the body he had at his command, and Valjean knew he was imagining what it would be like to bury himself inside it.

“Tonight, then?” he asked, already certain of the answer, and Javert drew in a shaky breath.

“Very well. Tonight.”  
  


* * *

  
Although he’d let Javert believe that this was simply the culmination of their courtship and a token of the esteem in which he held him – and indeed it was; certainly there had been no other Valjean had ever considered trusting with this intimacy – the truth was that he had been contemplating it for years, long before Javert crossed the threshold of his bedroom as anything but a pitiless adversary. It had preyed upon his mind ever since that night when he first brought Fantine to the infirmary and heard the story of the terrible sacrifices she had made for her child.

In the bagne, although he had witnessed it a thousand times beneath the unrelenting glare of the lamps, which were never extinguished and offered them no privacy even when they slept, the act meant nothing to him. It was one torture among many, like the beatings from the guards or the biting of the lice or the ravages of heat and cold: pain without purpose, suffering with no object, unless it was to degrade them into the beasts that society saw in them when it made the choice to cast them out. Valjean was strong enough not to fall victim, but not strong enough to spare pity for those who did. And so he ignored it.

But in Fantine he saw it transformed. Fantine had not been taken, she had given, offering her flesh to be scourged for the salvation of another even as Christ had on the cross. As Madeleine, Valjean had sought to escape from suffering as best he could: he had gained comfort, wealth, respect, and wrapped himself inside them like a cloak. Having been forced by others to endure so much pain for so long, he could not conceive then of inflicting it upon himself. But lurking at the edges of a dozen strangers’ funerals, he sensed dimly that there was something ungodly about this retreat from pain, something incomplete in his redemption. It was not enough simply to do good. In Fantine he found the answer: to become truly holy, one must also make a sacrifice.

And so he began to wonder what it felt like, to give yourself over in that way, to feel that cruel organ pierce you to the core and offer up the pain to your lover and to God.

In the convent he had dreamt of it sometimes, but there was only one other man there, and Fauchelevent would have been horrified at the thought of doing him any violence. So Valjean learned to make the sacrifices that the sisters did: eating plain fare, sleeping without a fire in his room, going without a coat in winter and wearing wool in summer. These small trials contented him for a time, and they seemed a fair recompense for the tranquility and safety he had been given in that refuge.

But then had come Paris, and the boy, and the barricades, and the river, and Javert. All at once it was made brutally clear to him that he had not given nearly enough, that so much more would be demanded, and the thought of losing Cosette was unbearable. He began to dream again of the penances he might offer instead, the castigations that might be inflicted on his body so that he would not have to pay that final, dreadful toll. All through that long, hot summer he tossed and turned in his bed, imagining how he might offer himself up, and when he and Javert came to their strange accord he thought that perhaps God had delivered His instrument.

Since Cosette’s engagement the question had burned in him with a new urgency. Valjean knew the pain of sex was punishment for the sin of Eve, but thought of his sweet, innocent child suffering in that way – it was wrong, intolerable. For Fantine to suffer, that was martyrdom. For himself and Javert, it was simple justice. But Cosette deserved nothing but happiness. Marius Pontmercy was a good, decent boy who loved her dearly, and Valjean knew he would be as gentle as he could. Perhaps there would even be wine or laudanum to dull the pain. But he could not bear the thought of surrendering her to that violence without seeing for himself what his beloved child must undergo.

In some small, secret corner of his mind that he kept hidden even from himself, he harbored the hope that perhaps if he were to go through the same ordeal it would forge a bond between them that need not be shattered by her marriage.  
  


* * *

  
Even Valjean, who saw Javert now with the eyes of love, could not honestly describe him as a beautiful man. But his lance was beautiful, in the way that all well-made weapons are beautiful. Javert’s features were as rough as if they’d been hewn from a block of wood, but his organ was incongruously delicate, a slender, gracefully curved spike just three inches long. As thick around as one of Valjean’s fingers at its base, it spiraled gently to a point no wider than a quill, shading from a rich rust color where it met Javert’s flesh to a luminous cream. At its root the sheath of horn that covered it was soft and slightly yielding, like a fingernail, but by the time it reached the tip it was harder than bone.

It was a spear made for just one purpose, to pierce a lover’s flesh. It had never been used.

Oh, Valjean had seen it erect before, standing out from the slit in Javert’s groin where it folded neatly away when it was not wanted. They tried as lovers did to bring each other off by hand, wrapping their fingers in wet rags and gripping and twisting the slippery length of horn, mindful always of the sharp tip. But onanism was not the purpose for which the lance had been intended, and it never truly satisfied. The terrible organ longed to spill blood, to bury itself in living meat.

Valjean would take his own lance to his grave without ever putting it to its proper use. He could not bear the thought of doing violence, even this small intimate violence, and Javert would not ask it of him. He understood Valjean’s need to expiate his sins through the sacrifice of his body, but he did not share it. Only the metal knives of the murderers and cutpurses of Paris would scar his virgin flanks.

But Javert did not share Valjean’s abhorrence of violence, and having a partner, he longed to do what a man did with his partner. He would never have presumed to ask, but Valjean saw it in his face sometimes when he ran his hands over the hard curves of Valjean’s muscles or when they made their inadequate little parody of love. For a moment his eyes would shine with a strange avidity, the consuming focus of a hunter poised to strike, before the light was shuttered and the impulse locked away and he resigned himself to a handful of rags.

In those moments, Valjean had wondered with an electric anticipation that was half fear and half arousal what it would feel like to be his prey. In a few minutes, he would know. 

As they lay naked together in his bed he felt a sense of awe come over him, stroking the smooth curve of Javert’s lance and seeing it again as if for the first time, its beauty and its terrible promise. He ran his finger along the underside, tracing the familiar seam along the bottom until he came to the slit just below the tip. It was strange to think that soon it would be inside him.

“Ready?” asked Javert, who looked nervous but resolute. He was not a man to second-guess a decision once it had been made. It was a relief to Valjean, whose stomach had been aquiver with butterflies all day. Had matters been left up to him he might have seized on any of a dozen excuses to call the whole thing off, but when Javert was ill at ease he took comfort not in securing his escape routes but in holding steady to his course. As long as Valjean did not call a halt to the proceedings they would go ahead as planned. There was nowhere to flee and Javert did not require further encouragement to take what he wanted. All Valjean had to do was lie back and accept the pain.

“It doesn’t feel quite real,” he confessed. “I’ve dreamt of this for so long.”

“Oh, you’ll know it’s real soon enough,” Javert said, rolling Valjean onto his back and clambering on top of him. His jutting lance sketched a path of ominous potential across Valjean’s belly. He lined himself up against Valjean’s abdomen, over the pads of fat and muscle that could take the blow without damage to major organs, and then he paused, suspended above him.

“Valjean–” he began, and then thought better of whatever he was planning to say, or decided he could say it better with actions than with words, and drove his lance down into Valjean.

It was uncomfortable, an unpleasant sensation of being poked by something sharp and hard. It was not actually painful. More to the point, it was not going in.

“Ouch. Javert, I think you need to be a little more forceful–”

“Yes, I can see that, thank you,” Javert said crossly. He had always been more conscious of his dignity than Valjean, and this was not how one envisioned one’s first sexual encounter. Somehow the bawdy songs and wine shop gossip never mentioned these complications.

He backed away, pushing himself back onto his hands and knees and lining himself up again, and then he slammed his hips against Valjean’s body.

For a moment there was just a blunt sense of force, and Valjean wondered if Javert had again failed to penetrate. Then the white-hot shock of it hit him and he gasped.

He had not expected it to burn like this. Long ago his back had been flogged to ribbons in the bagne; he thought he knew this pain. But those had been mere surface cuts, little gouges of the skin. This was something else, a foreign body piercing through deep layers of muscle. It burned hot and cold at once, and beneath the burn there was a terrible aching pressure. In its overwhelming intensity he could only liken it to that time in the Gorbeau tenement when he had burned his arm.

Instinctively Javert thrust deeper and twisted his hips. Now Valjean understood the gentle curve of the lance – it was a hook, to lock the thing inside him if he were to struggle and try to pull away. But he could not have struggled if he wanted to; he felt utterly paralyzed.

He could not imagine the expression on his own face, but Javert’s was blank with shock.

“Oh, Valjean, I can _feel_ you. I can feel you all around me, shivering. It’s as if we’re strung together on a wire.”

Now that he had grown a little more accustomed to the pain, Valjean could feel the connection as well. The rigid spike of horn linked their bodies together, transmitting even the faintest movements from one to the other. Javert had no more need to thrust now that his lance was firmly anchored inside Valjean, but Valjean could sense the minute flexing of his abdominal muscles as he worked his way to orgasm. It was a curious sort of unity.

After a moment Javert’s face took on that expression of fierce concentration that Valjean had learned was the prelude to his climax, and he came with a hoarse cry and a sharp increase in that aching sense of internal pressure. He twisted his hips again and pulled away, and his lance tugged free from the wound, crimson now from base to tip. Pink froth bubbled up after it.

Javert sat back on his heels, looking anxiously between the cut and Valjean’s face. He reached out and gently stroked his cheek.

“Valjean?”

“Don’t worry, I’m all right.” Valjean tried to rally himself to display some reasonable approximation of well-being, and managed a feeble smile. “It was just… it was very intense. Did you like it?”

Javert looked away. “You froze under me; I was afraid I had truly hurt you. I didn’t like that part. But as to the rest of it… You’re right, it was very intense. Yes, I liked it.”

Valjean groped for his hand and intertwined their fingers. “It’s perfectly natural. There is nothing to be ashamed of.”

Javert turned back to him, but only so that Valjean could fully appreciate his rolling eyes.

“It is my nature to hurt him, he says! Ah yes, I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You know that is not what I meant.”

“I know you have an appetite for self-destruction, and I indulge it more than I should,” Javert said. He pressed Valjean’s hand down against the wound. “Hold your hand there to stanch the blood. I will go and get the pitcher.”

They had thought beforehand to fill the water pitcher and to bring some cloths and lint to bandage the wound, but it had not occurred to either of them to lay them out beside the bed. Javert got up to retrieve them from Valjean’s little dressing table on the far side of the room and left Valjean to his thoughts.

He understood now the romance popularly associated with the act, which had appeared in a distorted form even in the bagne. There was something profound, almost holy, in that moment of connection. His heart still quailed in him at the thought of Cosette suffering such pain, but perhaps she too would wish to feel this strange unity, bought with a willing sacrifice. And of course she would want children of her own one day, and brave the lance for their sake as every mother must.

But to think Fantine had suffered this pain for her child, not just once, but a hundred times! To endure that terrible intimacy not with a lover, but with a stranger, and to carry the mark of that union forever – Valjean was humbled by her courage.

Javert came back with the pitcher and sat down on the edge of the bed. He wet a cloth and began to wipe away the blood.

“You do not regret it?” he asked.

“No. I wanted to know how it felt. I have wanted to know for such a long time. I am glad to have you; I am glad that you could give this to me.” He took up Javert’s clean hand in his bloody one and laid it over the wound, which still oozed blood and semen. “I will have a scar just there, and then everyone will know that I am yours.” 

And for the first time since Valjean made the suggestion days before, Javert smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bed bugs are terrible.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination) Don’t have sex with bed bugs!
> 
> They have [pretty dicks](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/1-male-bedbug-intromittant-organ-sem-power-and-syred.jpg) though.


End file.
